Like a Virgin

BE A LEADER

There used to be a school of parenting whereby children were supposed to be ‘seen and not heard’. Countless generations of kids grew up in homes where the only justification a parent would ever have to offer for just about anything was ‘Because I say so!’

Not surprisingly this carried forward into classrooms and workplaces where teachers and bosses simply replaced the parent as authority figures whose word was law.

Fortunately I grew up in a household where healthy debate was a way of life and, although my mother Eve usually had the last word (and still does), my sisters and I were encouraged to express our thoughts on anything and everything.

School was a different story, however, and my combination of dyslexia and rebelliousness should have made it abundantly clear to even the most casual observer that I was never destined to be anything but my own boss. Or, as my headmaster at Stowe School once put it, ‘By twenty-one, Branson, you’ll either be a millionaire or in prison.’

As it turned out, from the day I dropped out of school I have always been lucky enough to be my own boss and have never ended up behind bars – well, maybe once, but very briefly!

Perhaps, therefore, it is odd that if there is any one phrase that is guaranteed to set me off it’s when someone says to me, ‘Okay, fine. You’re the boss!’ What irks me is that in 90 per cent of such instances what that person is really saying is ‘Okay, then, I don’t agree with you but I’ll roll over and do it because you’re telling me to. But if it doesn’t work out I’ll be the first to remind everyone that it wasn’t my idea.’

In today’s business world I see this classic image of ‘the boss’ as a total anachronism. It may work in certain connotations like ‘organised crime boss’, ‘union boss’ or ‘pit boss’, but being bossy per se is not an attribute that I have ever seen as desirable in a manager or anyone else for that matter.

Some might say this is only a matter of semantics, but I truly believe that forward thinking workplaces benefit from a pronounced absence of traditional hierarchical labelling systems. Much of it starts with the image of ‘the guy in the corner’ office, something that is perpetuated throughout much of the corporate world by bricks and mortar.

The layout of the majority of office buildings serves quite literally to reinforce a management structure, from the executive suites on the top floor all the way down to the ‘lower level’ employees on the ground floor or in a windowless basement.

At Virgin we have studiously avoided having a glass and concrete world headquarters with the bosses lodged in upper-level corner offices. In my own case I have spent my career staying away from offices and have only ever worked from three places: houseboat, home and hammock. Our companies also all work from their own very individual locations and the address of the closest thing we have to a group headquarters says it all: ‘The Old Schoolhouse’ is anything but a corporate cathedral.

I have long been a big fan of open-plan offices with lots of communal brainstorming spaces, lounges, play areas, pool tables and kitchen areas where co-workers naturally come together and chew the fat. Office walls, doors, desks and counters are nothing but barriers to communication.

But back to the trouble with ‘the boss’: the old militaristic image of the general bossing his troops from far behind the front line, as opposed to leading them into battle, is not that different from the way many companies are still run today. Make no mistake: a leader is a very different animal from a boss.

If you aren’t frequently out there in the front line, leading the charge in lockstep with your employees, you simply cannot stay in touch with the realities of your business. Sitting in the boardroom listening to even the most comprehensive reports from the front can never compare with being there to see it and hear it first-hand.

Latin was never my favourite subject at school – in fact, I don’t think I had such a thing – but one word in the Latin class that registered with me was the verb ‘educere’. I remember being greatly surprised to learn that the root of the word ‘education’ actually means ‘to lead forth’. Until that moment I had thought of education as ‘cramming in’ but in reality it is supposed to be about ‘leading out’. While a bad school teacher, like a bad boss, will indeed teach or manage by cramming their opinions into their charges, a good educator or corporate leader will do the opposite and draw opinions and ideas out of their students or associates.

So next time someone says to you, ‘Okay, you’re the boss’ as they head for your office door, stop them in their tracks with ‘Not really, we’re all in this together. So come back here and tell me what you’d be doing with this if you were in my place?’ Better still, next time go and visit them in their office or sit down with them in the canteen and seek out their opinions on how things are going. Good examples of leadership can be infectious.

Perhaps the new corporate mantra should be ‘bosses should be seen and not heard’.